Team Scorpio's Position on Soozal's Stored Power Innovations

Since Sailing World recently published an article (July/August 2009) on Soozal's power winches, switches, and buttons, a firestorm of controversy has emerged.  Having finished a close second to Soozal in this year's StFYC Stone Cup and Sausalito YC IRC Regatta (May and June 2009), we have a lot of recent experience racing against them.  We've gone head to head with them in eight races and finished (3,5,1,2,2,3,3,3) against their (4,2,3,1,3,1,2,2).  That's a total of 22 points against their 18.  We've beaten them three times and they've beaten us five times.  As a result, I'm asked whether I think they have an unfair advantage.  They rate 1.123 and we rate 1.093.

Truth is, I really don't know if anything is unfair.  I'll leave that up to the RORC whom, I believe, does a pretty good job rating most boats.  Do they have an advantage?  Absolutely!  Keeping crew on the rail hiking while we're grinding to leeward is certainly beneficial.  However, the racing has been quite close with the exception of three races where they crushed us by 122, 120, and 728 seconds.  In the other five, we beat them by 15, 40, and 13 seconds, and they beat us by 28 and 23 seconds.  That's pretty close!  Consider that we sail an 18 year old IMS design against their six month old IRC design, and we sail with 10 group 1s and one group 3 compared with their primarily group 3 team.  In spite of those obstacles, we are competitive with them.  The only advantage we have is "time in the boat".  To me, that says a lot about the fairness of IRC.

My conclusion is that the Soozal team has put together a great program in a very short period of time.  They've figured out what it takes to win and they've done a lot of winning.  To me, it's a privilege to race against such a team.  They've certainly gotten our attention and elevated our program.  There's nothing like close big boat racing!

The score is now five to three in their favor.  We look forward to our remaining 15 races (in the SF Bay IRC series) to see if we can't overcome that deficit.

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